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The State of the Bagel

By Clyde Haberman June 23, 2011 8:30 amJune 23, 2011 8:30 am

Word that H & H Bagels was shutting its store on the Upper West Side produced something on the order of a seismic reaction in certain corners of New York, which considers itself both sun and moon of the bagel-eating universe.

Barely stifled wails arose from some West Siders, who reacted as if the news marked the end of civilization as we know it. Others, though, could not restrain themselves from saying, in effect: good riddance. This group included those who believed that an H & H bagel was not worth a schmear — horribly overpriced at $1.40 — and those who could not shed a tear for a store owner who had admitted last year to pocketing payroll taxes withheld from his employees.

Inevitably, other New Yorkers weighed in. Commenters to City Room included a Kings County chauvinist who wrote that “Brooklyn bagels were always better” and a fellow in Albany who looked northward and proclaimed the superiority of Montreal bagels.

On a matter this cosmic, it didn’t feel right to leave the discussion to patzers. This required an expert. We called on the food writer Mimi Sheraton, a connoisseur of many things, including the bagel and its first cousin, the bialy. A decade or so ago, she wrote a book called “The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World” (Broadway).

So, Ms. Sheraton, how would you describe the State of the Bagel in 2011 New York?

“In general, I think it’s deplorable,” she replied. “Primarily, it’s because of the enormous size.” Ideally, she said, a bagel should measure about 3.5 inches in diameter. Most bagels sold in New York these days are appreciably larger. That’s been true for years. (The diameter of the H & H bagel is 4.5 inches.)

“I understand why they do that,” Ms. Sheraton said. “The cost is in the labor, not in the ingredients. It’s expensive to make, and if they want to get a price to cover the labor, it’s my feeling that they have to charge high prices that they could not get for a normal small bagel.”

Why is bigger not better?

“The size, I think, affects the proportion of crust to interior,” she replied. “The thickness of these big ones makes them like rubber tires. They’re too big and puffy, because they use dough conditioners to keep them soft, so that they don’t turn to rocks overnight, as they did when I was kid. Not overnight — four hours! If you didn’t eat it in four hours, it was a stone.

“So I think they’re pandering to people who want a long shelf life and who want a big enough bagel to make it look like it’s worthwhile.”

There isn’t much that goes into making a bagel: flour, water, salt, yeast and a little malt. The trick, Ms. Sheraton said, is to boil it before baking it, to achieve a proper chewy texture. Not everyone does it right.

Just as we were about to ask what she thought of the vaunted Montreal bagel, she raised the matter herself.

“Friends who go to Montreal frequently brought us two batches of bagels,” she said. “I have never eaten anything worse called a bagel. They were thin rings. They looked more like a bracelet. No salt, lots of sugar. They were sweet. I couldn’t believe it. The lack of salt sort of threw me. I thought, ‘My God, what am I eating?’ But even here you can get blueberries and God knows what in your bagels.”

O.K., we have to ask this: Is it not possible that we have slipped a tad too deeply here into those-were-the-days sentiment?

“It’s very hard,” Ms. Sheraton said with a laugh, “not to remember good old days when it comes to bagels.”

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